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Marples and Beeching

Discussion in 'Steam Traction' started by GWR4707, Jan 8, 2020.

  1. johnofwessex

    johnofwessex Resident of Nat Pres

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    What I think would be interesting (Fancy a challenge @S.A.C. Martin ) is a 'popular' economic history of the railways.

    It might need to be in several volumes (Pre WW1, Interwar, BR & Privatisation)
     
  2. toplight

    toplight Well-Known Member

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    I would be interested to know more about what was the public and political reaction to the Beeching closures at the time ? Was there much protesting against it as these lines were being bulldozed. ? How was it felt at the time ?
    Closing main routes like the Great Central was just insanity imo. Was nationalisation seen as being at fault ?
     
  3. Jimc

    Jimc Part of the furniture

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    Outside the rail enthusiasts, who weren't really in numbers to count for much I don't think there was that much real protest. Sure a couple of thousand people turned out for the closure of a once popular branch line, but in the grand scheme of things the ten passengers who had used the line regularly counted for nothing against the thousands who wanted a new bypass built round their town.

    Its like town centres shutting down now. People talk about how dreadful it is that the high streets are shuttering up and the stores closing, but actually on the rare occasions they don't shop at Amazon they go to the out of town superstore.

    Yes, closing the railways was mildly unpopular, but building the bypasses and motorways was *really* popular.
     
    Last edited: Jan 5, 2022
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  4. 35B

    35B Nat Pres stalwart

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    Opposition was limited, and focused on specific routes at specific times. It almost became a general election issue in 1964 with the proposed Whitby closures, but wasn’t a critical issue.

    BR had been closing lines in significant numbers and mileages before Beeching; the difference there was that he’d collated the proposed closures in a single report that gave it focus - and therefore it’s place in folk memory.

    As for closing the GC, I’m far from convinced it was the wrong thing to do given the subsequent 20 years of railway history.


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  5. 30567

    30567 Part of the furniture Friend

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    I think that is broadly true. Hardy gives an example of the TUCC hearing into a proposed closure at Lincoln where the only objector prepared to speak against it was an angler from Sheffield. A lot of them were like that. But some were not. He says that closing the Gateacre line took nine years. And what was seen as inevitable in 1964 was not seen the same way by 1970. Times changed.
     
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  6. gwralatea

    gwralatea Member

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    The absolute classic (30 years before) of the genre was the deputation from Lynton going to see the Southern Railway about not closing their line, and *all* travelling to do so by car.
     
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  7. 30854

    30854 Resident of Nat Pres

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    From what little I know, reactions differed vastly according (as much as anything) to whether those road improvements indicated or replacement bus services promised materialised. In the former case, Dorset CC certainly shelled out to keep the Bridport branch ticking over, pending road upgrades. A lot of noise in North Devon and North Cornwall (left many miles from the rail network) amounted to nothing, but almost certainly would have been elegible for retention, had 'social hardships' been officially recognised at the time.

    In the case of the GC, looking across old timetables and taking into account what's been proffered regarding LNER finances, I honestly wonder whether a better question would be why the hell it was built in the first place? Without the benefit of Watkin's longed for Channel Tunnel to justify traffic projections, the financial case must've been marginal at the time.
     
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  8. Jimc

    Jimc Part of the furniture

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    Again though they were scarcely a big deal. Remember handful of passengers.

    I think the rail replacement bus for the Cranleigh Railway line lasted a couple of years, but noone much cared because it only stopped at the old railway stations, so everyone used the ordinary bus, even if the traffic in Guildford meant you missed school assembly 9 days out of ten [grin].

    The assumption was after a while just about everyone would get a car, and of course that's what happened.
     
  9. MellishR

    MellishR Resident of Nat Pres Friend

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    Perhaps a self-fulfilling prophecy, inasmuch as you pretty well had to get a car if the railway line had closed and the replacement buses were inadequate or missing entirely.

    If the authorities had known then what they know now …
     
  10. gwralatea

    gwralatea Member

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    The GC London Extension was a bit of a chameleon really - it was built almost by sheer force of personality, and arguably shouldn't have been, so that's a mark against it.

    Post grouping though, it gave the LNER some direct competition with the LMS, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing, and (once you, and I recognise 'once' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here accounted for the fact that it existed and the money was lost/spent) washed its face.

    Post Nationalisation it had value as an arterial freight route (which Beeching recognised) but the Clean Air Act and general industrial modernisation further reduced the key feather in the GC's cap - the sheer volume of London's coal which it transported in.

    Basically I wouldn't have built it, and circumstance killed it as the century progressed, but there was probably a good forty years - roughly 1910-1950 - where it absolutely made its own case for existence. I start from 1910 because starting at 1900 leaves the hangover of 'what have we done?' (from the shareholders) whereas 10 years later it was bedding in nicely.
     
  11. toplight

    toplight Well-Known Member

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    Good point, in that the high street decline is happening before our eyes, yet the public (myself included) don't like it but are largely indifferent to it. Shops like Debenhams it is sad to see close, but probably about 15 years since I last bought anything there.

    For me the closure of the lines is just the dreadful waste of the effort that was taken to build them in the first place.

    A rural branch like say the Highworth branch I could accept that closure was inevitable, and few real structures lost, but a line like the GCR I see all those huge viaducts, tunnels, stations like Nottingham Victoria, and Leicester Central. Major infracture, that must in todays money must have cost £Billions to build just wantonly flattened.
    An almost criminal waste.
    The Midland line through the Peak district to Manchester Central is another obvious one that should never have gone.

    For me nationalisation was the mistake. It meant that instead of rival lines both being owned by separate organisations, they both ended up being in the same hands and ,therefore, easy for mangement and government to say close one them, often just based on previous loyalities.
     
  12. 30854

    30854 Resident of Nat Pres

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    Cranleigh is within my regular stamping grounds and I know the place quite well. Even today, it's something of an oddball, in being a pretty substantial town with equally insubstantial access .... almost as if they're deliberately trying to keep the place off the beaten track, or intentionally generate traffic jams to encourage outsiders to take paths of least resistance, all of which give Cranleigh a wide berth! Local bus connections are mostly geared towards Guildford and quite reasonable .... during the day.

    The situation in the far south west is very different and the effects of the economic drag-chain which rail closures brought are evident to this day. Offset to some extent by the rise of the internet, a road network which is still poor scarcely encourages non-tourism related businesses. In terms of absolute numbers, the potential market (for 10 months in every twelve) is small, but in terms of percentage of the comparatively sparse population, economic deprevation is is way higher than somewhere like Cranleigh, or even down here (Brighton & Hove, which have a lot more deprived areas than many who've recently moved here might realise).

    Proposals to reinstate the line from Barnstaple to Bideford might bear fruit, but only if a significant proportion of the cost can somehow be subsumed within wider proposals for flood defence works.

    Talk of reconnecting Bude is another matter entirely. Though were it still open, the line might nowadays just about break even operationally, I doubt it would have a snowball in hell's chance of returning the sort of capital outlay reinstatement would involve. In any event 'direct' or 'high speed' aren't exactly an adjectives applicable to the sinuous former route between Bude and Okehampton.

    Further south, if Padstow isn't sufficiently lively a destination to be attractive to the B&WR, I can't imagine the prospects for any big railway reconnection being too good

    On the erstwhile Ilfracombe line, I could just about imagine a scenario involving reconstruction out to Braunton, but (as is the case at Ventnor on the IoW) the site of the old terminus remains as remote from and far above the centre of the town as ever.

    Okehampton - Tavistock - Plymouth. There's a significant strategic case for reinstatement and the sooner the powers that be stop dithering, the better for everyone.
     
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  13. 35B

    35B Nat Pres stalwart

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    I doubt the LNER would have been any more sentimental if the London Extension had ceased to be of value - or, come to that, the LMS if Midland and LNW routes weren't both required.

    However, there's a bigger question your post leaves me with - was that infrastructure an asset or a liability? If a railway had ceased to be of value, wasn't it better to pull the plug than try to keep it going just because of the historic investment? And, yes, I do wince every time I drive into the underground car park at the Victoria Centre in Nottingham, comparing what's there now to what was before.
     
  14. simon

    simon Resident of Nat Pres

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    Ah the fallacy of sunk costs - yes a lot of money was spent on the London extension, but if the line couldn't even cover its operating then it was just good money after bad to keep it open.
     
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  15. gwralatea

    gwralatea Member

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    agree, see my #130

    my only cavil would be to say that that's not to say that it never did, just that it's time had gone. Again, I wouldn't have built it, but it came good for a few decades before running out of trade and logic.
     
  16. Cartman

    Cartman Well-Known Member Account Suspended

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    Summerseat, on the line between Bury and Rawtenstall (the present day ELR) kicked off when the line was earmarked for closure under Beeching, it did get a temporary reprieve for a few years. In that case, the road to Summerseat was too narrow and winding to operate a bus service on, so the village would have been isolated.

    The Manchester to Bury electric line, which is now part of Metrolink was also down for closure, and this did attract a lot of opposition, which was successful as it is still functioning
     
  17. sir gilbert claughton

    sir gilbert claughton Well-Known Member

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    had it stayed open it could have been the basis for HS2 .................................................couldn't it ????
     
  18. 30854

    30854 Resident of Nat Pres

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    Given the chronology of the JNR 'Shinkansen', with a bit of foresight (I know!) and political will from UKPlc (which in the real world always judders along in fits and starts), we could've had the damned thing completed between London and Manchester 50 years ago and the northern section, via the Waverly route, to Edinburgh 30 years ago .... and that's being bl••dy generous with the timescale. Lions led by donkeys? More like donkeys led by hyenas! :Rage:
     
  19. 35B

    35B Nat Pres stalwart

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    Unlikely; the London extension wasn’t built to high speed standards, and the loading gauge was more restricted than legend has it. I’m also not sure I’d want to be on an island platform at (say) Finmere with trains at 200 mph or more coming by.


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  20. 30854

    30854 Resident of Nat Pres

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    My understanding is, with the possible exception of platform faces, the extension was built to Berne (not the modern UIC) loading gauge. Quite how much preventing high speed operation (obviously not envisaged in Watkins' day) would have been down to 'curable' factors, such as junction layouts and signalling, rather than even more eye-wateringly costly issues surrounding clearances and curvature, is .... and will remain .... purely moot.

    Coincidentally, since my earlier post, I stumbled on a clip by Jago Hazzard concerning the history of the GCR's Marylebone terminus. Whilst not a by any means in-depth nuts and bolts analysis, added to what else I've learned over the years, count me even more amazed the entire London extention got built in the first place.

    Just my tu'upence worth, but I still believe MagLev (existing systems are readily capable of 375mph) would've been a better option for a dedicated high-speed Anglo-Scottish link. Progress .... who needs it!
     

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